


Believing in Ghosts

by Kaylele



Series: All My Original Work Stuff [2]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Comfort, Family, Family Secrets, Ghosts, Haunting, Mystery, Ouija, Secrets, Superstition, Witches
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-29
Updated: 2020-06-29
Packaged: 2021-03-04 01:41:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24975523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kaylele/pseuds/Kaylele
Summary: Is believing in ghosts so wrong? Even when they're haunting you?
Series: All My Original Work Stuff [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1803400
Comments: 4
Kudos: 4





	Believing in Ghosts

"You know when I was your age, me and my sister played with an Ouija board. We tried to contact your grandfather but we messed up and contacted something else instead. I never want to see you playing around with one of those. They're evil and terrible. All they bring is bad luck." 

The first time I heard this story was from my mother, when I was eight. We were sitting in my uncle's living room watching a new scary movie that had just come out. Really, it wasn't too scary. Just some fake ghosts and blood. I didn't care much for the effects, they were kind of boring anyway. What I really cared about was the concept. The ability to summon ghosts with nothing more than a wooden board and a weird little triangle thing but when I asked my mom about it all I received was that story. 

Despite never admitting to it, my family (more importantly the females in my family) are extremely superstitious. On top of believing that Ouija boards were evil, my mother also disliked crows, never allowed us to walk under ladders and always told us to throw a pinch of salt over our shoulders if ever we accidentally spilled some on the table. My grandmother was just as superstitious, if not more. She could take one step in a house, declare it 'didn't feel safe' and walk right out. She thought stray dimes were gifts from dead loved ones, butterflies were signs of good luck and broken mirrors always brought bad fortune. On top of it all she told us to never meddle with spirits, no matter how good you thought they were. 

Growing up, I assumed that these things were perfectly normal and true. After all, my family would never believe something so crazy if it wasn't true, would they? Well, apparently they would. Unfortunately, I learned this the hard way, subsequently becoming an outcast after trying to tell my friends about dead family members and dimes. From that day, I decided it would probably be easier to just keep my superstitions to myself. Maybe then my classmates wouldn't think I was crazy.

Apparently I was crazy, though, I just hadn't realized it yet. It all started with me simply misplacing my things. Being a stupid kid, I assumed this was normal. Kids lost things all the time and I shouldn't have been any exception. At least that's what I thought, until it started getting weird. I'd walk out of my room for no more than a few minutes and walk back in to see that something had changed. The yellow dress that was hanging off my dresser was now on my bed or the color pencils I had on my desk were now all over the floor. Oftentimes, I tried to chalk it up to the wind, or my dog or literally anything else but sometimes I couldn't. Sometimes it was simply unexplainable. 

The noises came next which were somehow far less intimidating than the random misplacements. Usually, it just sounded like wind, until it started sounding like voices. I'd often ignore them and simply carry on with my day. Sometimes it sounded like people were calling my name but usually they never were. 

I came to the conclusion that I was going crazy when I started seeing things. Shadows, figures, people's faces. I tried to ignore them as best I could but it was difficult. I was a teenager now and reality was slowly starting to set in. I could no longer blame my misplaced items on lack of memory and no matter how hard I tried, I had to admit that it wasn't the wind making those strange noises. 

The way I saw it, there were two options. Either I was insane, or there were ghosts that had taken a liking to me. The first one seemed much more plausible. After all, ghosts didn't really exist, did they? They couldn't. They were just made up for the sake of scaring children. Clearly, I was just highly deranged… but there was an issue with that. For one, highly deranged people usually don't just 'realize' or 'decide' that they're deranged and for two aside from the misplacement, strange noises and occasional shadows, there wasn't much else wrong with me. I wasn't depressed, or anxious, or paranoid, or angry, or anything else that normally accompanied these things. In fact, outside of my 'ghostly encounters', I was a pretty normal teenager. Or at least as normal as I could get, given I dressed in all black and hung out with mostly outcasts and nerds. 

It took a little while, but eventually I decided that I wasn't going crazy… but I wasn't being haunted either. I didn't quite know what was wrong with me to be honest and part of me didn't want to know. I started to just ignore these things, in hopes that eventually they would go away, but they didn't. Instead I just managed to get used to it. The 'ghosts' didn't scare me anymore. Instead they started to feel warm.. almost welcoming. It was like I was never alone anymore. There was always someone or something there with me now, watching over me and keeping me safe. 

It wasn't until I became an adult that I came to some realizations about my family and where I came from. For starters, all of the women in my family have this strange 'ghostly intuition' as they call it. Really, it's just the ability to feel uneasy whenever they walk into a place that is supposedly haunted (even if nobody told them it was haunted beforehand). Secondly, my family seems to have a strange amount of knowledge about Ouija boards and what they're capable of (even owning one at one point in time) despite living in a time when they really weren't that wide spread. Before the popular movie "Ouija" came out, the boards were difficult to find and typically only appeared in the homes of those who actually used them on a regular basis (aka only those who practiced witchcraft or something similar owned them). And finally, my heritage remains shrouded in mystery. Sure my family talks a lot about immediate family members but any knowledge past my great grandma is almost unheard of. Similarly, my biological grandfather's side is almost non-existent. I don't have a long, extensive family tree. I barely know who my family is at all. 

I don't want to call out my family and say that they're all witches and mediums. I really don't know who they were or what they did, but something just feels fishy. Uneasy. Like someone isn't telling the whole truth. I feel like there's a lot of important things that are simply getting swept under the rug. Unfortunately for me, I can't uncover these answers. I don't have the resources or the authority. What I can do though is live with it. I can find comfort in the spirits who stick by me every day and maybe one day I be a little bit closer to the truth.

**Author's Note:**

> Based on a true story 💀🖤 Hooray!


End file.
